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Valentine had nightmares of meeting a high-speed relief train coming south head-on and had to make plans for the abandonment of their charges. But they made Crow's turnoff, and the rocking and clattering increased as they moved down the old spur line.
The terrain around here was too hilly for good legworm ranching, but herds of sheep and goats grazed on the slopes. They passed signage for old coal mines, saw the rusting, vine-covered remains of old conveyors and towers frowning down on slag piles tufted with weeds and bracken fighting for a precarious existence on soil that had accumulated in nooks and crannies. In some places more recent strip mining scarred the hills, leaving the Kentucky ridges looking like an abandoned, opened-up cadaver on an autopsy table.
They set up watches, allowing most of his men to rest. There was little enough left to eat.
Valentine didn't think much of their guide, a rather slow man in his thirties who thought that by "guide," his duties required telling old family stories about who got married in which valley, the hunting abilities of his preacher's astonishing coon dogs, and the time Len Partridge got his index finger blown off by Old Murphy for sneak-visiting Mrs. Murphy while he was off gathering legworm egg skin. Valentine did manage to glean that the Kurians still sent trains into this region in the fall to trade for legworm meat, though it was sandwiched into a story about a wounded hawk his cousin Brady nursed back to health and trained for duck hunting.
Luckily there were only brief delays due to downed trees on the tracks. The men moved-or in one case dynamited-the trees with high-spirited enthusiasm. The audacity of a theft of an entire train had been the highlight of the march across Kentucky.
But the sinking sun set him nervously pacing the caboose until he realized he was making the rest of the occupants nervous, and he distracted himself by discussing Salazar's condition with Cabbage.
They came to a small river and stopped to check the bridge's soundness, with Valentine thanking his lucky star that he had such a diverse group of ex-Quislings in his company. He consulted his map and saw that the river arced up into the hills where Seng was headquartered. Sheep and goats and several legworms grazed in the valley.
"The bridge'll hold, sir," came the report over the intercom. "We can take a span out with dynamite and slow up the pursuit."
Not the Reapers. They'd come hot and hard with men on horses, or motorbikes, or bicycles, homing in on the crowded lifesign in the railcars-
Valentine tapped the intercom thoughtfully. "I want a conference with all officers,"
Valentine said. "Give the refugees fifteen minutes out of the cars."
* * * *
They traded the captured rifles and shotguns and boxes of ammunition with the shepherd families for a generous supply of sheep and goats. The shepherds and goatherds thought him a madman: He was willing to take kids, tough old billies, sick sheep, lamed lambs. Valen-tine was interested more in quantity than future breeding potential. He warned them that there'd be some angry Reapers coming up the tracks shortly, and they'd better clear out and play dumb.
Then he had his men load the animals onto the boxcars.
The toughest part was convincing Patel to leave the train with a squad of men to guide the hundreds of refugees into the hills.
"Do I have to make it an order, Sergeant Major?" Valentine asked. Valentine hated to fall back on rank.
"It'll come to a fight when they catch up to you, sir. The men will need me."
"I know the job now. I was lucky as a junior lieutenant. My captain put me with his best sergeant on my first operation in the Kurian Zone."
Patel relented and walked around to the remaining NCOs, giving tips and hurrying up the loading of the livestock.
"Give 'em hell, billy goat legion," Patel said as he walked off with the crowds from the boxcars and into a hillside defile on the far side of the river. Patel wanted to put at least a ridge between the tracks and the lifesign he was giving off before nightfall.
David Valentine watched them go, silently wishing them luck.
The animals he'd purchased but couldn't fit into the train, he left behind to muddle the tracks. They'd fuzz up the Reaper's sensing abilities for a few moments, anway. The smell of goats reminded him of his induction into the Wolves. Valentine wondered what he'd say if he could have a talk with that kid he'd been.
He thought of a young couple he'd noticed, clinging to each other in doubt as they looked back at the boxcars as Patel led them into the defile. How did they get selected for harvesting?
Sterile? Passing out anti-Kurian pamphlets printed in some basement? The woman had mouthed "thank you" at him. That goat-sniffing kid would have written Father Max a long letter about those two words.
"It's worth it," Valentine muttered.
Valentine still had a few refugees: the old unable to make a long walk, the sick, and a few devoted souls who stayed behind to tend to them. He gave them a boxcar of their own just in front of the caboose.
Then they pulled across the bridge and dynamited the center span in a frosty twilight.
Valentine didn't hear any cheers as ties spun like blown dandelion tufts into the river. He had too many engineers in the attenuated company who'd sweated over the calculations and effort required to build a bridge.
The train squealed into motion again. Now the clatter of the wheels passing over points was accompanied by the bleating of goats and bawling of sheep.
Now the question was whether they'd make enough of a lifesign signal to draw the Reapers. He had what was left of his company, plus the refugees, plus whatever signal the sheep and goats would send.
